


Chips and Books

by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Background Doctor/Rose, F/M, Fires of Pompeii-inspired, Gen, Unicorn and the Wasp, episode tags, the stone rose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-10
Updated: 2008-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24103828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: Two episode tags: one prior to the Fires of Pompeii and the other after the Unicorn and the Wasp. The Doctor finds inspiration for some of his trips with Donna in some unlikely places.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Kudos: 11





	1. Chip

Donna had insisted on settling in, putting boxes in the room the TARDIS had shuffled to the front for her. She'd even insisted on having a night's worth of sleep, pointing out that it had been a full day for them both, hanging off of buildings and all. The Doctor knew better than to argue with humans over getting their sleep. Well, he knew better now. There had been companions where letting them get a full night's worth of sleep was practically a defense mechanism. Donna seemed to be shaping up to be one of those.

Perhaps that'd be good for him, he thought, settling himself down to make a few repairs on the TARDIS’ console. As these repairs often did, they started out simple and little and often got bigger and bigger until he found himself pulling up sections of the floor grating to get at some certain circuit underneath or something similar.

While he worked, shoring up loose connections and bolstering circuitry as best he could on the old girl, he pondered where to take Donna for her first trip in the TARDIS. Perhaps she’d like the future, the day humanity made it past the solar system, or the dedication of the moons of Habilius Prime. The Doctor grimaced at the bundle of wires he held, simultaneously trying to suss out which one he needed and unimpressed by Donna’s supposed reaction to any of his ideas.

Somewhere fun, definitely. Perhaps Serenity Base on its hundredth anniversary? He remembered that one as quite the party. But nothing struck him as quite right.

Earth’s past then, he should think. He’d avoid Aztecs (Donna would inevitably want to rescue the guinea pigs), wars (he had a habit of landing in wars at the worst possible time) and Queen Victoria. So what did that leave?

He was opening another panel to get at the calibrator for the Tachyon Displacement Modulator when the stone chip fell from where it had lodged itself in the workings of the TARDIS oh so long ago, hitting him in the nose. It hadn’t hurt, merely surprised him into sitting back on his heels before retrieving the debris.

He held the stone chip up to the nearest source of light, a power cell above his head. “Now where did you come from?” He muttered to it, turning it in the blue light.

No answer was forthcoming from the white stone. It looked too big to have been tracked in on somebody’s shoe, and one edge was fairly regular, as if it had been cut. Putting the stone to his tongue, he realized in a flash what it was, and how it had gotten there.

“Marble,” he said aloud, not expecting an answer.

But the ship gave him one, giving a deeper thrum than usual as the power cell brightened for an instant. The Doctor’s eyes went wide as he realized what his ship was telling him. “Oh no no no no,” he breathed out, setting the stone chip down at his feet as if it had burned him.

The marble had come from a statue, he remembered. White marble, carved over long months with exacting precision. The face, hands, earrings, dress, all as clear in his mind as the day he’d finished it. The statue of Rose had rested here, only momentarily, the dust and grime of the work itself confined to a room that the TARDIS had shuffled back into the immensity of things.

But it was funny how one tiny stone could bring everything back, including the first time he thought he’d lost her, and the second, and every time after that until the losing her became real. Until the loss from which he could not bring her back.

“We’re not going to Rome. You remember what happened with Martha?” He reminded his ship impatiently. Martha, who’d seen herself as a rebound because of the simple fact that he would return to some place he’d seen once before with Rose.

Something in the back of his mind, whether the by the TARDIS’ influence or by his own, strange instincts, told him that it would be different with Donna. She didn’t love him, no more than she should, anyway, didn’t see him as a god, or infallible. She’d listened when he’d mentioned Rose, and not as someone cataloging a rival or enemy. Maybe she’d be able to see past the fact that he’d been there once before.

Besides, he smiled sadly, Rome could be rather fun when one wasn’t being turned to stone or chased by lions. And Donna would get to go somewhere she’d probably read about, as a kid, that was exciting and real and there. Somewhere she wouldn’t stand out too much.

Footsteps on the grating from the corridor alerted him to his new companion’s presence before she appeared, leaning over the hole he’d been in, making repairs. “Morning, Doctor.”

The Doctor pocketed the stone chip, lifted himself out of the floor, and replaced the section of grating he’d lifted out with exaggerated care. Brushing his suit trousers off, he stood and grinned at her. “So, Ms. Noble, are you ready for your first proper TARDIS trip?”

Donna grinned right back, all enthusiasm. “Am I ever.”


	2. The Book in the Trunk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes inspiration strikes after, or, how _did_ he come by that copy of the Agatha Christie book, and why was it there?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by me matching up dates from books and previous episodes like the strange person I am. Nicachick007 served as beta, for which I am eternally grateful.

Rose sank into the jump seat, her eyes focused far away as if seeing in her head the room they had just left, where Cassandra was dying for the last time. Slowly, his footsteps falling like stones into the quiet of the room, the Doctor made his way up the ramp. The first few flicks of switches were slow, deliberate, cutting them adrift back into the Time Vortex, before he finally flicked his eyes up to Rose.

Before he could ask her if she was alright or not, she spoke. “You know, we didn’t really get to see much of it.”

The Doctor blinked, thinking back along the course the day had taken. “Ah,” he said, coming to it himself, “New New York.”

Rose nodded slowly before turning her eyes on him so suddenly that he was almost startled by it. “Can we go back?”

“Oh.” He looked down. “Well.”

She stood, smiling at the prospect. “Think of it as a little break. No medical zombies, no Cassandras, just you and me and the city of New New York.”

He didn’t go back. That was a fact, a part of who he was. But with Rose there, all pink and yellow and smiles and beauty he could lose himself in for just a little while, he thinks that maybe he can change this too. And so he smiled back up at her, the bounce coming back into him a little. “Alright. You and me, on the town. New New York.” As he speaks his hands punched and pulled and twisted dials, the sorts of things necessary to getting them where they wanted to be.

Rose stood to help, holding levers and buttons when asked. Soon they opened the TARDIS doors on to New Central Park, a bit squarer than its predecessor, but with many of the features reproduced, especially the Strawberry Fields, he told her, smiling broadly.

They’d taken a stroll down one of the leafy avenues, absent of cars, for those criss-crossed the sky above their heads. The streets were a pedestrian-only area, perfect for strolling and to Rose’s great delight, window-shopping. Pleasant as the weather was on whatever day they had chosen near their last landing, it was a welcome relief when the Doctor pulled her by the hand into the shade and cool of a second-hand bookstore.

“They still read paper books this far out?” Rose asked, flipping idly through a worn copy of Pride and Prejudice that looked not dissimilar from copies she had seen at bookstores in her own time.

The Doctor poked his head from around the next shelf to peer at her, his thick glasses perched on his nose. “Oh yes!” He said, clearly enthused by this idea. “The lovers of books in the paper and glue form never really die out.” He wandered over to her row, flipping through a paperback as he went. “Librarians, both professional and amateur, helped to save the medium in the second half of the twenty-second century, and they haven’t died out since.”

Rose, only half listening, put the copy of the Austen novel back onto the shelf where it had been, wedged in with the rest of the bunch. “And what authors?” She asks, curious because, but for Austen and Dickens, she hasn’t seen many names that rang a bell in her mostly twenty-first century-educated mind.

He flapped the pages of the book he held against his free hand, gazing around these shelves before moving off to investigate the other shelves, reporting any names he thought she might recognize. She followed slightly behind him, gazing at the row of books, grazing them with her fingers from time to time as he spoke.

“Shakespeare, of course, and Marlow and Chaucer; Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Tennyson; Gatharda–no that’s later, what’s that doing here? Wilde, Faulkner, Agatha Christie…”

She nearly ran him over in the mystery section when he stopped in front of it. “How ‘bout that?” He grinned down at Rose when she caught herself from running into him. “Agatha Christie in the year five billion.”

Rose tilted her head at the rows of covers, bright colors and intriguing titles peeking out from their places, all in a row. “I’ve never read Agatha Christie,” she confessed mildly.

He frowned. “Really? Well we’ll have to remedy that!” Seemingly at random he pulled one off of the shelf, handing it to her with a flourish. “Here. Rose Tyler, meet Hercule Poirot.”

Though her lashes, Rose looked up at him, her eyes dancing with mirth. “Hercule?”

“Trust me, you like it,” he told her, giving her that look again over the top edge of the glasses that she was tempted to term his librarian look. But she didn’t know how he’d feel about that.

She’d put it on the table by her bed when she went to bed that night. Once she finished that one, she’d moved on to the rest of the TARDIS’ collection of Christie, slowly moving through them. But she always kept the first one he’d given her near to her bedside.

*

It had taken him eight days, fourteen hours and seventeen minutes from the moment he’d lost her for him to go back into her room. Two weeks and a day for him to do anything but walk right back out or break down in some fashion whenever he entered. It was only three and a half weeks, give or take a few hours, before he stood in the middle of the plush carpet the TARDIS had provided for her–her–his whole body tingling without the emotions bubbling out and over again.

He’d looked around then. The strewn clothes, the tubes and rounds of make-up and lotions and such colonizing her dresser-top, the few books and other articles set upon her bedside table–everything made a picture that he, up until this moment, had not been able to look at as a whole without some piece throwing him back into his sadness.

After a moment he realized he was standing, doing nothing. Randomly, he moved towards the bedside table. A lamp, a pen, a glass from which the water had long ago evaporated, a stone from a far-off planet, a statuette from Chairon Alpha, and a book, face-down.

Moving aside a scrap of paper, any writing made illegible by the doodles scrawled over it, he picked up the book. It was the Christie novel, the first one he’d given her. Wasn’t paper, he thought, the traditional gift for a first anniversary? Appropriate then, considering when he’d given her this copy, he mused.

As he turned the book over in his hands, a small disk fell out from between the pages, bouncing onto the floor with a muffled thunk. Bending, the book still in his hands, he retrieved the fallen thing, examining it in the light from the lamp.

When he finished watching her goodbye–Emergency Program Rose, she’d called it–he put the book into the trunk under the flooring where he kept things that he needed close to him but which couldn’t be carried in his pockets for one reason or another. He’d keep it on him, but he was afraid it’d burn right through him to carry something that reminded him so of her so close to him.

*

As he lay the book back down among the other collected, important trinkets of his travels, he thought back to that conversation in the cool of the second-hand bookstore, five billion years after Agatha Christie had lived and died. A memory of that day in Rose’s room rose alongside the other, more pleasant memory.

But it didn’t hurt, that was the strange thing. Well, it did, but it wasn’t that twisting, wrenching feeling he’d once felt, every time he thought of her, thought of her gone. This was the slow, awful ache of memory, right below his breastbone, just like for all of the others. Stronger for her, yes, for being all the more recent and so much stronger than most things he’d felt before like this, but all the same, the same pang of memory.

He realized that Rose would probably always be like this to him; a stain on his hearts, on his hands. He couldn’t let her go, he never would be able to. But at least every day it hurt a little less. That was all he could hope for, he supposed.

As he and Donna flew off to the next location, the Doctor thought of her, his Rose, shining eyes and golden hair, in a bookstore and on a beach, and remembered.


End file.
